Tulsa, Oklahoma mulls name change for landmarks named for KKK leader

The second-largest city in Oklahoma is embroiled in controversy over whether to change the name of a large section of downtown that is currently named after an early town leader who was a prominent member of white supremacy group the Ku Klux Klan.

Wyatt Tate Brady owned a general store and hotel, operated a
newspaper and signed Tulsa’s town papers when Oklahoma became a
state in 1907. The town father’s presence still emanates
throughout the city, where a street, mansions, theater, and an
entire historic neighborhood are named in his honor. A new
entertainment district, Tulsa's largest in a generation,
according to the Associated Press, is known as the Brady Arts
District.

An article published two years ago in the Tulsa-based magazine
This Land detailed a previously hidden side of Brady’s legacy.
The son of a Confederate soldier who fought in the Civil War,
Brady was a leading member of the Knights of Liberty, a KKK group
that instigated the Tulsa Race Riot that leveled the
African-American community of Greenwood in 1921. An estimated 300
black people were killed and another 10,000 left homeless as a
result of the row.

Brady’s newspaper was accused of inciting racial tension in the
years before the riot by publishing propaganda, and he himself
was later accused of buying up the land that was vacated in the
riot.

“Tate Brady’s prominence and wealth increased with each
passing year,” wrote Lee Roy Chapman in This Land. “In
their tenure, his retail stores sold some $5 million worth of
goods ($60 million in today’s dollars), and the Hotel Brady did
$3 million in business. He began to invest in coal mining
operations and farming interests. In the early twenties he began
expanding his property holdings, spending $1 million in property
acquisitions – some of which was in Greenwood.”

African-American leaders have complained that Tulsa has glossed
over its own local history. Three quarters of Tulsa residents
described themselves as “very or somewhat knowledgeable about
the riot,” according to The New York Times, though only one
national textbook publisher mentions the riot in its history
books.

“There are councilors who are concerned and ashamed that we
have this name, and we know what Mr. Brady stood for,” Jack
Henderson, Tulsa’s only black city council member, told the AP,
adding that the downtown district is “growing like it’s never
grown before.”

“So changing the name of the street isn’t going to stop the
momentum,” he said. Henderson planned to reintroduce a bill
Thursday that would change Brady Street’s name to Burlington
Street.

Other lawmakers, along with a contingent of local business
owners, have expressed doubt over the idea, in part because of
the Brady Arts District’s prominent place in city
marketing.

“Rather than seeking to revise history, today’s residents,
visitors and merchants should regard the name as a demonstration
of a new set of principles,” Brady Arts District
entrepreneurs wrote in a July 14 letter. “Removing the name is
to surrender to the past.”

Approximately 40 people who lived through the riot still survive.
Most of those still living were too poor to relocate in 1921,
forced to subsist in tents where their homes stood before being
looted and burnt to the ground.

“These people are still alive,” Reggie Turner, who has
campaigned for reparations for the survivors, told the Times in
2011. “And despite their dwindling numbers – in fact, because
of their dwindling numbers – it should be easy for us to take
care of them.”